Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice
Ken Gelder
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0415379520
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London’s ‘Elizabethan underworld’, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx’s later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew’s view of subcultures as ‘those that will not work’. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem ‘immersed’ or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood:
- through their often negative relation to work: idle, parasitical, hedonistic, criminal
- their negative or ambivalent relation to class
- their association with territory - the ‘street’, the ‘hood’, the club - rather than property
- their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of ‘belonging’
- their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation)
- their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and in particular, of massification.
Subcultures looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, which means that its focus is literary as well as sociological. It also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography: that subcultures inhabit places in particular ways, their investment in them being as much imaginary as real and, in some cases, strikingly utopian.
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820
Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
Adbusters, Issue 54: I, Terrorist
Diet Pills (Junior Drug Awareness)
Countries and Their Cultures, Volume 4: Saint Kitts - Zimbabwe
Adbusters, Issue 54: I, Terrorist
Affectionately primitivising terminology is consistent with earlier studies of tramps and hobos, including that of Nels Anderson’s famous study of homeless, migratory men in Chicago, The Hobo (1923), to which I shall return in Chapter 2. The tramping children are ‘tribal’, they meet in ‘jungles’, and so on: this is how their sociality is expressed. Away from the home and family, they are also potentially threatening, nocturnal and prowling. Timothy J. Gilfoyle has given a similar, more recent.
Roll (1649), a wild tirade against social inequality and hypocrisy. This remarkable rant imagines a new ‘Jerusalem’ in England, literally vomited out of Coppe’s body as he deliriously transcribes the word of God: Go up to London, to London, the great City, write, write, write. And behold I writ, and lo a hand was sent to me, and a roll of a book was within…& the Roll thrust into my mouth, and I eat it up, and filled my bowels with it, where it was bitter as wormwood; and it lay broiling, and.
Edmund Curll. Curll published a wide variety of cheap books and pamphlets: medical cures, scandals, hack biographies of recently deceased authors, Whig political tracts, a range of pirated, unauthorised material, and pornography. In 1724 he published Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock, the translation of a French pornographic work that led to his arrest and conviction for obscenity (possibly the first such conviction in England). For an early biographer, he is ‘the unspeakable.
At least) is textually anti-authoritarian, a kind of semiotic (rather than sexual) queering of the linguistic pitch. Ultimately, it is less about ‘warfare’ and more to do with ‘play’ (126). Punk for Hebdige may have ‘signified chaos at every level’, but it could also be read or understood as a ‘meaningful whole’ (113). He drew on the term homology to express this, a term used earlier on by Paul Willis but again derived, like bricolage, from the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. Homology tied.
Rapper’, rather like the white bebop musician, is condemned always to appear to be inauthentic. From a ‘global’ perspective, on the other hand, it can sometimes seem as if pretty much anyone can do it. Tony Mitchell has been critical of black American commentators who celebrate hip hop ‘as an essentialist and monocultural expression of AfricanAmerican culture’ and refuse – rather like George’s touring rap performers – ‘to look outside the parochial, provincial and increasingly atrophied and.